flying game for ps3

October 29, 2010 7:39 PM

Have PS3, want to fly.

I have a PS3. I want to play a flying game. Shooting things and using dogfight tactics in my airplane or spaceship is fun too.

The closest I've come to what I'm looking for is Dropship: United Peace Force, which involves short missions, some of which involve a variety of neat VTOL aircraft that have afterburners, different maneuverability profiles, guns, missiles and ASMs. Flying around and shooting things in this game is pretty fun. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of missions that involve staying on the ground in jeeps and tanks, and that's a deal breaker as it annoys me.

Not looking for: a straight flight simulator; something requiring special hardware; something with a high learning curve; WWI or WWII; something that you have to budget more than an hour for per session; something not goal-directed. Basically looking for a game where I can sit down, boot up, fly around and shoot things for half an hour, save and quit. The flying should be fun, in the way that a good video game flying experience is fun without having to worry about air-fuel ratios, elevon trim, and details like that.

What game do I want?

posted by Protocols of the Elders of Sockpuppetry to sports, hobbies, & recreation (7 answers total)

Battlefield 1943 is a downloadable game for 15 i think. It's an online shooter that allows you to go on the ground, by tank/car, or in ww2 planes. No missions, you just jump in, find a plane and start shooting ground targets and dogfighting. It's arcadey, not really a sim, but sounds like what you are lookin for.
posted by ShootTheMoon at 8:01 PM on October 29, 2010

Yeah, you're looking for the Ace Combat series. The entries on playstation2 (4, 5, 0) are all pretty excellent, with 4 being an early title and somewhat short, 5 really being the highlight, and zero being a pretty excellent expansion to 5. Sadly, AC6 was Xbox360 exclusive, but the next one (due in 2011) will be on both systems.
posted by Oktober at 8:12 PM on October 29, 2010

You can look into HAWX 2 as well.
posted by demiurge at 9:02 PM on October 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

Afterburner was released this summer on the PSN store. I picked it up, it's like ten dollars, and it's almost exactly like the arcade version (you get your choice of planes, though). The only quibble I had was that it's way too easy to go into a barrel roll. In the arcade, you pretty much had to slam the controls to the side to get the barrel roll going. With the controlling, slight nudges to L3 will do it. A bit too sensitive. Other than that, it's a great flying, shooting, blow stuff up game.
posted by Ghidorah at 12:02 AM on October 30, 2010

Warhawk is worth a look in the store. There is a demo for download.
posted by episodic at 2:40 AM on October 30, 2010

IGN: IL-2: Sturmovik: Birds of Prey is also on the store.
posted by episodic at 2:53 AM on October 30, 2010

Hawx 2 and Afterburner Climax were more or less what I was looking for. Thanks, folks.
posted by Protocols of the Elders of Sockpuppetry at 10:01 PM on November 17, 2010